1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a simulator and simulation method for verifying plural products with common hardware configuration and, more particularly, to a simulator in which peripheral hardware that can be reused are constituted by hardware and other peripheral hardware is constituted by software simulator.
2. Description of the Related Art
In verifying the operation of a target product to be marketed, it is desirable to product the target product itself and verify it. However, in terms of production cost and product man-hour, the operation verification is often made using a simulator of the target product. In order to perform the verification of the operation of a target product at low cost, there is known a simulator constituted by a hardware emulator for emulating part of hardware configuration of the target product and a software simulator for simulating other hardware configuration of the target product.
Further, there is known a hardware acceleration system that writes hardware logic to be simulated into an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) so as to allow the hardware logic to be executed on the FPGA (refer to, e.g., Patent Document 1: Jpn. Pat. Appln. Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-223476).
However, in the simulator constituted by the hardware emulator and software simulator, the hardware emulator needs to be changed whenever the hardware configuration of a target product is changed, so that the hardware emulator cannot be reused and therefore effective low cost goal cannot be achieved.
Further, also in the hardware acceleration system of Patent Document 1, all hardware logic in the hardware configuration thereof need to be written into the FPGA whenever the hardware configuration of a target product is changed.